Basics of Audio File Processing in R
In today’s day and age, digital audio has been part and parcel of our life. One can talk to Siri or Alexa or “Ok Google” to search for information. Siri or Alexa or Google knows who is asking for information, and can search for the ask and reply contextually.
The idea of writing this post is to provide basic information on audio processing using R as the programming language. However, before we go to using R as our choice of language, let’s walk through and understand some basics of sound and digital audio.
What is Sound?
Sound is a pressure change of air molecules created by a vibrating object.
This pressure change by vibrating object creates a wave. A wave is how sound propagates. Sound is a thus a mechanical wave that results from the back and forth vibration of the particles of the medium through which the sound wave is moving [4]. Sound is processed through our ears via the ‘auditory’ sense. Thus, sound can also be called as audio. Audio processing a hugely researched domain and lot of very good papers talk about audio processing. As part of this post we will only talk about very basic but helpful information to develop an intuitive understanding.
